Changing Tides Under Ba Sing Se
by FictionIsSocialInquiry
Summary: The past begins to blur. It looks like an oil painting left out during a storm. He forgets how he came to be in the Crystal Catacombs, and when Katara asks him why he was thrown into that dark, dank hole of a cave, he drops his head into his hands because he can barely remember.
1. Changing Tides Under Ba Sing Se

**Changing Tides Under Ba Sing Se | Part One**

 _It starts with his name._

' _Zuko?!'_

 _He acknowledges her only with a medley of surprise_ — _wide eyes and parted lips._

' _Why did they throw you in here?'_

 _How could he explain the mess of tangle and snares that are the knots of a whole life? Why_ did _they throw him in here? Why did his father burn him and send him into the cold, harsh world to chase at rumours? Why does his stomach clench whenever he thinks of his homeland under the rule of his sister? Why do his Uncle's words confuse what should be easy: his loyalty to his father? How does he tell an enemy this?_

 _He doesn't._

 _He yells at her and tells her she's wrong. They each spit venom and she lists his every uncertain failure as though he were a scroll open for all to see._

 _But the Fire Nation took her mother. That's something they have in common._

' _I'm sorry I yelled at you before.'_

' _It doesn't matter.'_

' _It's just that for so long now, whenever I would imagine the face of the enemy, it was your face.'_

' _My face? I see.'_

' _No, no, that's-that's not what I mean...'_

 _Spirit water, she tells him, it has special healing properties._

 _He hears dripping and trickling nearby and the waterbender steps closer. 'I don't know if it would work, but…'_

 _Fingers soft as water bubbling down a brook touch his face. Not the smooth, unburnt skin. His scar._

\- o -

At first, it's like finding your bearings after being lost in the salty world of white water and crashing waves. The vertigo lingers— the bitterness of a nightmare on the edge of your palate— but he is grounded by the familiarity of his name.

'Zuko?!'

She can't be here. He has just seen the Water Tribe girl disappear with her broken Avatar and her vial of liquid life.

'Why did they throw you in here?' Somewhere, water drips and trickles. The sound must be a comfort to the waterbender, it must have given her strength; she bristles with it, as though well-rested. As though she hasn't just fought him, vicious as a wolf-tiger, under green crystals and grey stone— 'Oh, wait, let me guess. It's a trap. So that when Aang shows up to help me, you can finally have him in your little Fire Nation clutches!'

A dream. His fever has returned. His shame in betraying his uncle has sent him careering into madness.

'You're a terrible person! You know that?' The waterbender continues and as she does, the stagnant scent of mould and damp crowds Zuko. 'Always following us! Hunting the Avatar! Trying to capture the world's last hope for peace!'

He betrayed Uncle. That is Zuko's only crime. Even though he attempted to aid their enemy, something about the old man's capture doesn't sit well with Zuko...

'But what do you care?' Her voice drips with derision, it leaks from her like a burst dam. 'You're the Fire Lord's son. Spreading war and violence and hatred is in your blood!'

'You don't know what you're talking about,' he tells her—told her. But it's Zuko who's feeling unsteady sitting against cold, sturdy stone.

\- o -

The stale air of the cave is the first taste against his tongue as the vertigo clears.

'Zuko?!'

He feels the waterbender's glower like a sting against his cheek. He's worn that glare already, three times now.

'Why did they throw you in here?'

'What are you doing?' he whispers, blinking the dull glow of the crystals from his sight.

Her frown only deepens. 'Let me guess. It's a trap. So that when Aang shows up to help me, you can finally have him in your little Fire Nation clutches!'

Zuko closes his eyes and sees the Avatar fall. Sees his uncle's gaze touch his only for shame to turn it aside.

'You're a terrible person! You know that?'

 _I am a terrible person._

\- o -

As a child, Zuko's mother taught him to treat girls with respect. Always act courteously. Introduce yourself politely. Listen to a woman when she talks. Ask after her parents. Take an interest in the things she likes. Serve her the best you have to offer. Never strike her.

His mother would be horrified at the ferocity of the fire he shoots at the waterbender over and over. Seven, eight, nine, ten times the cycle repeats, casting her and the Avatar as his antagonists each time.

He's not stupid, but stubbornness has long been Zuko's blindside.

It's not until the waterbender's eleventh tirade that he breaks script.

'I don't think we've ever actually introduced ourselves,' he realises in the haggard silence after she colours his bloodline with war and violence.

She's a distrustful shade of suspicion. 'It's a little hard to be polite when you spend every minute with us trying to _burn_ us!'

'I'm not firebending at you now.' _Not yet_.

She eyes him strangely. 'I already know who you are.'

He tells her anyway. 'I am Zuko, son of Ursa and Firelord Ozai, and heir to the throne.'

Distant thunder claps echo in her glare. 'Katara,' she bites out. 'Daughter of Kya and Chief Hakoda, and the last waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe.'

'The last?'

Destiny is a funny thing. 'You have no idea what this war has put me through,' she tells him again. 'Me personally… the Fire Nation took my mother away from me.'

His mother would be ashamed to see him sit across from a girl weeping for her lost childhood, his intentions to betray her unchanged.

\- o -

'You're a terrible—'

'I don't care.'

'What—'

'Enough, peasant!'

'How dare you—!'

'I can't believe my uncle turns on me for you.'

She rears like a towering wave, teetering, ready to crash down over him with foaming fury.

\- o -

The past begins to blur. It looks like an oil painting left out during a storm. He forgets how he came to be in the Crystal Catacombs, and when Katara asks him why he was thrown into that dark, dank hole of a cave, he drops his head into his hands because he can barely remember.

'Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time...' It's important she knows this, before the Avatar bursts through the cave wall and everything devolves into smoking water and liquid flames. 'I think I've forgotten this before…'

The waterbender— Katara— looks concerned and more than a little frightened. 'Zuko?'

'Let me guess,' he intones dully. 'Why did they throw me in here?'

'What?' she shakes her head as though to shake a persistent wasp-fly. 'Wait… are you crying?'

He wonders if she can feel his tears with her bending. 'I am.' He holds to that. 'Right now, whenever that is, for however long it's here, I'm crying and I'm talking to you.'

A pinprick of warm, summer's light bursts through the cavern. Katara may not be able to see it, but it shines brightly as a rescue vessel in an ocean of nighttime navy and grey. He did have memory. He was living now, wasn't he? Here with the last Southern waterbender.

Zuko clings to the idea like a child to its blanket.

'What's your brother's name?' he asks suddenly, staring at her.

She blinks eyes bluer than any gem in his father's treasury. 'Um… Sokka. Why? What's with you?'

'He fights with a boomerang, right?'

'Yes. Not that it ever did much good against firebending…'

Zuko chuckles, sweet, heady relief. _Of course not_.

\- o -

The waterbender tells him about snow caps and those huge frozen travellers, glaciers, that trudge solidly across the land. They are stoic. They are set on a course from which they never waver. She tells him about delighted afternoons back in the South, trying to coax snow to dance from three yards away. She shares her excitement for her bending and her devastation that there was no master remaining among her people to teach her.

She tells him a hundred fragments in the minutes before his Uncle and the Avatar arrive and ruin it. When his Uncle and the Avatar do arrive, he has to turn on her. He starts to dread the skirmish between them.

\- o -

'I'm sorry I yelled at you before.'

'It doesn't matter.' It does even though he's learned how to get her on-side quickly now. He knows which words unlock her fury and invite her curiosity. But he's never been able to stop her anger or her tears for her mother.

'It's just that for so long now, whenever I would imagine the face of the enemy, it was your face.'

He doesn't say the words, just tastes the last cup of tea he shared with his Uncle and lightly traces the edge of his scar.

'No, no, that's-that's not what I mean.'

 _It's okay_. 'I used to think this scar marked me. The mark of the banished prince, cursed to chase the Avatar forever. But lately, I've realised I'm free to determine my own destiny, even if I'll never be free of my mark.' Words he's uttered a hundred times over but stopped listening to. He wants her to know this about him, so he persists in repeating the words each time around. But for the first time he hears them in a different way.

He _is_ free to make his own destiny. He may be stuck in this loop, this endless repetition of glowing crystals and lightning strikes that grow hate and fear in the girl beside him, but he makes the choice to place his hand against the ground this time. To feel the scratch of round stone against his palm. He knows more now about the girl, the Avatar, his confusion about his family... He knows the waterbender well enough now to know how utterly devastating the Avatar's fall will be for her. He's free to make his own destiny…

'Maybe you could be free of it.'

His heart hammers. 'What?'

'I have healing abilities.' _Oh, right_.

He shakes his head, and disappointment he doesn't quite understand itches at him… any moment now his spine will tingle as she touches the ruin of his left eye as though it isn't the repulsive mess he knows it to be. And then the Avatar will arrive, then Azula, and then that soft touch on his face will take up icy water against him.

For the first time, Zuko fears that he might have chosen the wrong side.

\- o -

Water surrounds him, threatening on all sides.

'I thought you had changed!'

He drops the fire in his fists and lets the torrent swell around his ankles and consume him.

\- o -

'Do you think we would be friends if there was no war? Or if we were on the same side?'

'... I don't know. Probably.'

'I think we would be… your friends are lucky to have you.'

'Um, thank you. I guess…'

'I won't fight you. I can't turn on Azula, but I won't help her either.'

'What are you talking about?'

\- o -

He makes her laugh for the first time.

He watches the surprised amusement rise in the expressive planes of her face— the sun chasing away the night— and feels the presence of something bigger than himself. Water is the element of change and Katara would be a force for change to rival the Avatar. No wonder the airbender clings to her so tenaciously.

'What will you do after the war?' he wonders aloud.

Her eyes light with the endless possibilities of a future Zuko cannot see.

\- o -

Whatever spirit has cursed him, whichever otherworldly being he has offended, the part of him that speaks with his Uncle's voice finds some peace in the situation. This exercise of his stubbornness, his choices, the endless opportunities to continue to learn from his mistakes, come to him in small tones of appreciation. In how he relishes the burn Azula gives him— sizzling and searing against his skin— as he leaps to the waterbender's defence. In the giddiness he feels as the waterbender's laugh echoes through those dank, grim caverns. In the necessary kiss of blue and red flame, hammering at one another in a spectacular array of colour and smoke. In the scent of his sister's frustration as the battle turns against her; bitter, dangerous fury. In the taste of pride on his tongue, of fulfilling a destiny of his own making.

'It's over, Azula.' The new words send vibrant colour out into the cave; this is unscripted. This is new. The possibility fills his lungs to twice their size; anything could happen.

His sister sits, panting, in a puddle of mud and defeat. 'It's over when _I_ say it's over, Zuzu!'

The Avatar walks up beside him, Katara on his right. Zuko turns to her in his elation, to share a look, to share his joy at the sweet delight of something new. This is new for all of them, he realises. Though none of the others seem to have experienced this time in the catacombs more than once, he relishes the tentative smiles on his former enemies' faces.

He's still smiling when Azula strikes.

Uncle Iroh learned to redirect lightning by studying the waterbenders of the North. He has seen Katara bending hundreds of times by now. The way she turns her opponent's energy against them, letting her defense become her offense. Perhaps that's what she has done to Zuko, however unknowingly. With eyes as sharp as water whips, a heart as full as the ocean, and the strength of the driving rain, she found common ground with him. Turned his anger and his indecision into mindfulness and clarity. Waterbenders deal with the flow of energy.

Zuko thinks that perhaps his Uncle won't be the only person to miss him. His sister's lightning hits home and all of a sudden he's thirteen years old, kneeling in agony before a father he so desperately wants the approval of.

But his father is the cruellest person to please.

'Zuko!'

This isn't another beginning. The sound of her voice is wrong. She should be all fury and indignation, not fear. Don't be afraid.

The cool touch of water against the numbness in his chest isn't enough; he knows it somehow. Water is change and flow, but fire is the element of power, energy, desire, will.

And Azula has willed him gone.


	2. Epilogue

**Changing Tides Under Ba Sing Se | Part Two**

Azula's lightning strikes him with all the venom of a snake that tosses Zuko into a fitful sleep, not of death but barely of the living. In the murk of that place, he sees every single repetition of his time under Ba Sing Se. And he hears ghosts discussing him from the darkness…

' _This is water from the Spirit Oasis at the North Pole.'_

'What are you doing?! Don't untie him!'

'Get away from him!'

'But he could wake up any minute!'

'I said leave him, Sokka!'

' _It has special properties… '_

'…kept talking about you. About how you draw on all the elements to make your own bending stronger. How you sat with him when he was sick; he said he dreamed of you as a dragon, helping him stay strong… I don't know, I didn't really understand a lot of it. He seemed… out of sorts.'

'My nephew said this?'

'… _so I've been saving it for something important.'_

'Did you, um…'

'What?'

'Back in the catacombs… before Sifu Iroh and I found you, what… what did you and Zuko talk about?'

The silence is bruising.

'Katara?'

'A lot,' says the distant voice of his healer.

' _I don't know if it would work, but...'_

Ba Sing Se has fallen and Zuko lays in the lap of his former enemy, soaring through clouds on the back of a sky bison. He is damaged, some part of him is broken, but the vial of spirit water on the waterbender's wrist is empty and air rasps between his lips. It's weak, fragile as a fledgling bird, but he feels his fingertips, his toes. His body hurts, but it's there.

He tries to thank her, but she is smiling and crying and touching his face and all he can do right now is sleep.


End file.
